Tattoos were tied to socio-economic class when I was young, something for sailors and truckers and sometimes gang members. That has changed generationally. I have four tattoos so-far, a fifth planned, though only one is always visible, and mostly unnoticed.
The first tattoo I got, when I graduated from Divinity School, is a band on my left arm containing a passage from the gospel according to Luke the Physician, written in the original Koine Greek from what is accepted by serious New Testament scholars as the standard edition, the Novum Testamentum Graece frequently called the Nestle-Aland after the famous German scripture scholars critical in its development, the father and son Eberhard and Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland. The Nestle-Aland offers the consensus reading as well as the manuscript variants, for there is no official Bible, despite what you may have been told, certainly not a four century old translation into Jacobin English.
In fact, and speaking of four, our four primary ancient manuscripts of the Bible, called codices, are from the 4th century, and in the four gospels, there are variants in more than 40% of the verses.
It might be a little geeky to have scripture in the original Greek, or at least as close as we can get to the original Greek, tattooed on my arm.
Who am I kidding? It is full-on nerd.
But there is a reason behind my choice. You see, the line is the one we proclaimed at the start of this service of the resurrection, the one we translate as “The Lord is risen indeed.” And that is good enough for our purposes most days.
It is enough to know that the followers of Jesus still experienced him as present in some very real way we don’t quite understand, even though two days earlier they had seen him brutally tortured and executed by the Romans with the help of rich Hebrew collaborators.
It is enough to believe that good can triumph over evil, even if we might prefer to take a shortcut directly to victory without all of that suffering, to go from the Lord’s Supper to resurrection without everything in between.
But, being the nerd that I am, I know and I care that the English language translation of that particular line of text permanently inked into my flesh is imperfect.
Teasing out the exact meaning can be difficult since the originals were in all caps with no punctuation or spaces, but most scholars agree that in the Koine Greek, the line is a passive participle. In English, it might read more like “the Lord being one who has been raised up,” which would honestly be a bit awkward to shout on Easter morning.
The critical point for me here is that Jesus does not raise himself from the dead. And we can go down a lot of rabbit holes here, but the bottom line is that Jesus needed a hand, whether he was a human street preacher from Galilee or a presence of God-with-Us or the second person in a trinitarian mystery, which, by the way, should say everything and does say everything in this sermon, for Jesus only and always exists in relationship and it is the power of that relationship that brings him out of the grave in the story we tell.
A story that has instead been turned into a series of litmus tests in which otherwise rational people are expected to accept completely irrational primitive notions or abandon the faith altogether. You either believe in the Virgin Birth or you are out, never mind everything you learned in biology or medical school or experienced first-hand yourself through what probably seemed like never-ending labor.
You either believe that he was completely bodily dead and then brought back to life or you are not a Christian.
At least this is what they would have us believe. But the earliest Christian texts we have are by Paul, and as Ross Allen reminds us in a recent article in The Christian Century, Paul believed the resurrection was spiritual. The inner circle that follows Jesus doesn’t always recognize him after he is resurrected, and he has the ability to pass through a locked door. The post-resurrection reports both support and contradict bodily resurrection.
Further, Ross notes, Paul operated from an entirely different worldview than the one we operate in today.
And what is that worldview?
In keeping with the Enlightenment and Modernity, we dissect everything and place bits of the corpse in little boxes carefully labeled in museums of the mind, or in the case of the ethnographers and anthropologists a century ago, literally put pieces of corpses, physical and cultural, into little boxes in museums.
The Cartesian mantra of “I think, therefore I am” is so much brain-on-a-stick and so much less than fully-embodied human. Why not “I feel, therefore I am?” Or “I create, therefore I am?” And what, in the name of all that is holy, does Descartes do with all of the things that most certainly exist but certainly do not think in the way humans think about thinking?
In case you are missing the point, let me put it this way: I believe God who is not made in my image and does not fit into the pages of some ancient book, operates in ways I do not and will not ever understand. I believe the followers of Jesus were not involved in some conspiracy to deceive, but truly believed that they continued to experience the person they had loved and followed even after he was killed, though I do not believe a dead body got up out of the grave. This isn’t The Walking Dead.
I do not know what happened at the tomb and honestly, I do not care.
Though, seriously, I’ll take a pass on the Ascension because we do know what is up, and it isn’t a heavenly throne.
The Lord is risen indeed because our story is the story of life from what seemed dead and each of us have seen resurrection again and again if we were paying even the slightest attention to the world around us.
The Lord is risen indeed because love is tough and mysterious and there is something we cannot label and put in a jar that carries on, that kicks and claws and fights for the light, that sings in the shower and dances in the kitchen.
The Lord is risen indeed because she got sober and he went into remission and there was a child that was supposed to be impossible, for they had been told they would never have children together.
The Lord is risen indeed because we practice resurrection when we look at our friend Lazarus and like our Savior have the courage to believe there is still a chance, when we call one another out of our tombs of dysfunction and despair.
The Lord is risen indeed when you can see no future and yet grace happens, doors open, and love appears as if by magic because love is magic and wild and untamable like our God.
The irony is that the explosion of scientific knowledge, the discovery of evolution and natural selection, of relativity and the Higgs boson, has actually made holy mystery more holy and more mysterious without the need for magic babies and zombie saviors.
We are constantly reminded of the power of story, for good and for ill, from the toxic false narrative that justified white entitlement and centuries of brutality and genocide in the Americas to the fictional worlds where an orphan can defeat evil, with a wand or with a lightsaber.
Story has power, and yet we have allowed others to make Christianity smaller and smaller, meaner and meaner, a story emptied of mystery, just check boxes on an immigration form that gets you into some maybe heaven…
The Lord being one who has been raised up is still here, not wounded flesh and pierced and bloody body flying up into the sky, though if that works for you, cool. You rock with that.
The Lord being one who has been raised up is still here every time we witness resurrection, every time we practice resurrection, every time we heal and feed and invite the one who seems dead out of the grave. Every time we are carried along by the power and beauty that is flowing through every single day, if we only choose to tap into, align ourselves with it, hum to that holy song.
All that hate. All that greed. All that fear. And still…
Love wins. “Ontos eegertheen o kyrios.” The Lord is risen indeed. Amen.